City of San Diego officials estimated last year that San Diego State’s new lease to use Qualcomm Stadium for football games would net $90,000 per season for the city after expenses.

After one year in the new lease, records recently obtained by the Union-Tribune show that it was 20 percent less than that — $71,889 — amid continued sparse attendance for Aztecs football games.

It’s still a significant improvement from the old SDSU lease — under which city taxpayers were suffering $180,000 in annual losses. But the city and SDSU are banking on an improved SDSU football program to drum up revenue for each. SDSU even has considered a telemarketing campaign to boost ticket sales this year.

“We were losing $180,000 a year doing SDSU football in the past,” said Mike McSweeney, manager of city-owned Qualcomm Stadium. “We’ve turned that around. Now hopefully as the team does better, we’ll grow with that too. You always want more, and you have to have a little faith that the program is going to improve, and that ticket sales will improve.”

Under terms of the new lease, SDSU is to pay all game-related expenses. The bill for that was about $525,000, including about $120,000 for police, traffic control, parking lot management and fire marshal. With those expenses paid, the city receives its $71,889 profit from a $1-per-ticket surcharge on most tickets except for students and groups.

These terms were hammered out after more than a year of often difficult lease negotiations between SDSU and city officials. City taxpayers previously had been subsidizing SDSU’s struggling football program by picking up about $30,000 per game in expenses. During negotiations, city officials insisted on the $1-per-ticket surcharge as a way to ensure that the city not only stops subsidizing SDSU football, but gets some rent back, too.

The question for the long term is whether the city will be satisfied with a low level of rent if attendance fails to improve. The city can reopen negotiations in four years if it doesn’t think it’s getting a good deal on rent. The lease runs through 2018. Either party can opt out of the 10-year lease with five years’ notice.

“Obviously we were disappointed we didn’t hit the attendance number we had,” said Chuck Lang, SDSU’s assistant athletic director for business administration. “But we’re not hugely off of that either.”

Turnstile counts, which measure bodies passing through the gates, show that SDSU averaged 17,622 per home game last season, down from 28,336 in 2004. SDSU hasn’t had a winning season since 1998 and has seen its season-ticket sales shrink from 14,207 in 2006 to 9,668 last year, which included 3,240 season “tickets for kids” priced at $5 per game, according to SDSU ticket records.